Teaching in Higher Ed

2 Persistent Myths About Teaching and Learning

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I just finished listening to a Teaching in Higher Ed podcast episode with Mike Caulfield on digital literacy that will air on Thursday, February 2.

Not to give too much away, but at the end of the conversation, we chat about the tooth fairy, and other childhood myths. I joke about how I have tended to stay away from controversial topics on the podcast, but that I couldn't resist sharing that my husband and I don't plan on telling our children that there is such a thing as the tooth fairy.

Since I have started down the path of breaking out of my “safe” topics pattern here on Teaching on Higher Ed, I thought I would share two myths about learning that are almost always cause for concern by people who have subscribed to them throughout their career as educators.

We all have one primary learning style that needs to be accommodated for in our learning

I bought into this myth for at least the first ten years of my corporate training career. Now, I'm confident that believing in this myth actually makes our teaching worse.

One take-away from the research that debunks this myth is to have multiple approaches for helping learners comprehend what you're trying to teach, instead of gearing the students' experiences toward their preferred learning experience. Consider ways of making your teaching visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, using more than one approach at a time.

I once posted about the learning styles myth on my personal Facebook page, having no idea the topic is as controversial as it seems to be… Please refrain from thinking that showing this myth for what it is (unsubstantiated) does not mean that people don't have learning disabilities. That's an entirely different domain. Yes, dyslexia exists, for example… and there are ways in which we, as educators, should be accommodating for that disability.

If we have learners “practice by doing,” they will retain 75% of what they're “taught”

This learning pyramid has also been propagated across multiple educational contexts. It is meant to encourage us to move up as high as we can on the pyramid, lest we leave people only remembering 5% of what we said. This is not to say that there isn't ample research to illustrate the effectiveness of active learning pedagogical approaches, but doesn't the “tidiness” of these numbers make you a bit suspicious?

Active learning can help motivate students and help them retain more information. However, the process of learning (and teaching) is far more complex than a diagram like this could ever convey.

Your Turn

What teaching and learning myths have you observed that have persisted for too long now?

How to Create a Pencast

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Pencast

I've found pencasting to be a tool that is aligned with my pedagogy and valued by my students. Many of you have asked for me to share about my process, so I've created a How to Pencast video.

How to Pencast Video

In the pencasting video, I describe:

  • What pencasting is
  • Why it is vital to my teaching and instructional design
  • Essential tools for pencasting
  • My pencasting toolkit
  • How I record and publish pencasts

Additional Resources for Pencasting

 

Lessons in Curation from Maria Popova of Brain Pickings

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This post is written to my #edd703 doctoral students, though the contents apply to all of us who are practicing what Karl Weick coined as sense-making… 

Maria Popova. Photograph by Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times

We're starting to get further down the path of establishing a personal knowledge management system (PKM) for ourselves. One part that often gets struggled with the most is the sense-making piece.

I find people often want to spend much more time using Baskin Robbin's taster spoon style approaches to try to find another app that they can add to their PKM mix, or even decide to do away with one of the pieces of PKM, completely.

As Peter Senge and others explain:

Weick likened the process of sensemaking to cartography. What we map depends on where we look, what factors we choose to focus on, and what aspects of the terrain we decide to represent. Since these choices will shape the kind of map we produce, there is no perfect map of a terrain. Therefore, making sense is more than an act of analysis; it’s an act of creativity.”

Previously, I proposed that one way we can rid ourselves of the anxiety around sharing is to think of ourselves as curators. Today, I want to introduce you to a person who prefers not to think of herself as a curator, but whose life's work would fit well with what we have been talking about, in terms of PKM.

Maria Popova started her blog as an experimental email sent to seven of her coworkers. She eventually moved her content online and started Brain Pickings. Popova says that her blog:

…is a cross-disciplinary LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces spanning art, science, psychology, design, philosophy, history, politics, anthropology, and more; pieces that enrich our mental pool of resources and empower combinatorial ideas that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful. Above all, it’s about how these different disciplines illuminate one another to glean some insight, directly or indirectly, into that grand question of how to live, and how to live well.”

Popova is held up as one who is massively “productive,” in terms of the amount of information she consumes, makes sense of, and then shares on a daily basis.

In an interview with Krista Tippet for On Being, she was asked about the ways in which her work has been quantified by others.

Tippet inquires as to whether or not the rumors are true that Popova invests 450 hours on a monthly basis in her work. She also asks if Popova truly reads 15 books on a weekly basis, or writes between three and eight hours a day. Popova responds:

I think it’s actually a gross underestimate. I read and write from the minute I wake up to the moment I go to sleep at night and everything in between. Even those — I get around on bikes, so I commute. And whatever I listen to, that feeds in. That’s part of the reading. And so I would say the hours are probably a lot more.” [laughs]

It's tempting to get caught up in the numbers. I read 23 books in 2016, which felt like it required tremendous effort on my part. It's hard to fathom reading 15 books per week, even if it was what “paid the bills.”

It would be easy to glance at Popova's story and move on, since clearly we could never be her, in terms of her productivity. That's why what Popova says next in the On Being interview is so paramount:

…I want to say something important about that. Even if it’s factually true, I think the framing is a little bit misleading because it’s framed as a sort of productivity thing. Look at how much some random person in the world gets done, you know? And for me, it feels very purposeful. And I think what’s funny is that I used to marvel for a long time why my best ideas — and I don’t mean — by ideas, I don’t mean the ideas that — about what to write or all of that, but just insights on the truths of my experience, of the human experience, whatever.

Those ideas, the best of them came to me at the gym or on my bike or in the shower. And I used to have these elaborate theories that maybe there was something about the movement of the body and the water that magically sparked a deeper consciousness. But I’ve really come to realize the obvious thing, which is that these are simply the most unburdened spaces in my life, the moments in which I have the greatest uninterrupted intimacy with my own mind, with my own experience. And there’s nothing magical, at least not in the mystical sense, about that. It’s just a kind of ordinary magic that’s available to each of us just by default if only we made that deliberate choice to make room for it and to invite it in.”

Those of us who are more achievement-oriented can easily turn PKM into a numbers game. When we look to people like Dave Pell or Maria Popova, it's easy to tell ourselves that we won't ever be able to produce that much content, so this whole process must not be for us.

When I'm able to back away at the quantitative aspects of my own engagement online, there's a rich story being told about the opportunities I have had to be invited in to the human experience. As you continue to refine your own PKM systems, I encourage you to think about doing far less, but to make a “deliberate choice to make room for” the gifts that curiosity and reflection can bring.

I hope you'll carve out some time this week to listen to this conversation between Maria Popova and Krista Tippet for On Being. There's so much more than what I've posted here, in terms of “[Popova's] gleanings on what it means to lead a good life — intellectually, creatively, and spiritually.”

Ultimately, I pray you'll “build pockets of stillness” into your days this week, even if it seems impossible.

Determining Who We Are in Digital Spaces

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personal branding

The Question

I received this question from one of my doctoral students:

I really have no idea how to create a “brand” or how to create my blog to reflect who I am.  Do you have any suggestions on how to figure out who I am, in the land of technology?”

Her question was so powerful that I wanted to share my thoughts to a broader community and invite others to provide suggestions to her, as well. In my reply to her, I'll consider:

  • What is a personal brand and is that the “right way” to talk about our online presence?
  • How do our blogs and other social media help to reflect who we are?
  • How do we figure out who we are, when we're online?

My Response

Let me start by saying how glad I am that you're asking these questions. Part of what has gone wrong with social media in certain contexts is that others haven't pondered in this way, before engaging online. Those of us who are more present online rarely stop asking these questions. Recent examples of these kinds of reflections include:

  • My friend and his husband just adopted a beautiful baby girl. They are reflecting on how much they want to share about her online and in what context.
  • A friend from college just announced that after the worst year of her life, that she and her husband were now separated, as of New Year's eve. She shared that she usually prefers to keep all her posts on Facebook positive, but she knew people would want to be aware of this change in her life.
  • Many educators pondered how to return to the classroom, after the results of the Presidential election had been announced.

Personal Branding

The first time I remember having someone attempt to convince me that I was needed the same thing that my breakfast cereal did, was in a keynote talk given by Tom Peters in the early 90s. Cheerios needed help being identified and valued in the minds of consumers. And I needed help being identified and valued in the minds of current and future employers.

Tom Peters asserted:

Starting today you are a brand.

You're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop. To start thinking like your own favorite brand manager, ask yourself the same question the brand managers at Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different? Give yourself the traditional 15-words-or-less contest challenge. Take the time to write down your answer. And then take the time to read it. Several times.”

I was intrigued, but also wasn't sure that I wanted to be some big corporate brand. Peters also wrote about more of us being freelancers, and at that time, that idea scared the heck out of me. The idea of an A-Z guide for my personal brand seemed too inauthentic for whatever it was I might attempt to do online. Yet, I didn't want to leave the results of what happened whenever someone inevitably Googled me in the hands of others.

Blogging and Social Media as Reflections of “Us”

Finding a voice online is difficult in the same way that figuring out who we are and who we are becoming when we're in-person is hard. We can certainly opt to hide all sorts of things about ourselves when we're online, but we can do that when we're face-to-face, as well. Greg McKeown warns us that thinking of ourselves as a multitude of skills is dangerous and that rather, we should consider our one main distinctive that we want others to perceive about us.

For me, that answer took a long time to come by, but I'm a teacher. That's what I do. That's what I'm good at. That's what I think about, constantly. When I blog or participate in social media, my primary focus is going to be on teaching. These days, I often get to be a teacher of other teachers, which brings me great joy.

In one of my doctoral classes, our professor recommended that we think about who our “stick figure is…” That is, who is it that you serve? Who is your audience of one? Rather than thinking about a broad, target market, he proposed that we find one person who we can always consider ourselves “talking to” when we blog, or give voice to our thoughts in other ways.

Adding Value Online

Once we have started thinking about the primary way we might be able to serve others and who one of the people we provide value for might be, we then can think about how to express some of that online. It can be intimidating to do this for a whole host of reasons, including that it's hard to be authentic, because it requires such vulnerability.

One way to get started is to think less about creating original content and instead provide value by seeking out others' content, making sense of it, and then sharing it.

Become a Curator

The most extreme example of being an expert curator is Dave Pell. He makes his whole living reading the news and then synthesizing it for those of us who don't have time to read 75 news sites a day. While I suspect you won't have time to go to that kind of extreme, as you consider your primary distinctive, hopefully you're regularly consuming news, resources, and other information in that area.

Here's a less-extreme examples of curation around a personal brand. Mike Taylor is an expert in the training and development field who I've been following for years now. Mike's LinkedIn profile is reflective of someone who has done the work to articulate and refine the way others come to know him. In his own words, he is:

Exploring the intersection of learning, technology & social media”

As 2016 ended, Mike created a series of curated posts, all around the theme of 12×12. 12 posts that each contained 12 items. Here were a few that caught my eye:

Next Steps

None of what I've described above is easy. This journey is best taken in small steps and with the realization that you'll never be done. I wish you the best as you start down the path and hope others will share their advice with you, as well.

Fall 2016 Experiments and Evaluations

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Our university switched over to online course evaluations this semester.

The good news is that the system they decided to use integrates with our learning management system (Canvas). They were able to set up reminders for students to complete the evaluations that were irritating enough to get them to complete them. All seemed to go smoothly on the students' end of things, in terms of collecting the desired data.

I received a 93% response rate on the evaluations, making them essentially comparable to when we were doing paper evaluations in past semesters.

What I consider to be the bad news is that we weren't informed about how we would be evaluated on our teaching, prior to the evaluations being distributed to our students in our LMS.

When we moved off of our old system, we were no longer allowed to use our provider's proprietary set of course evaluation questions. New questions were developed by our institution, but word never went out as to what questions our students would be asked about their learning experience.

My 2016 Fall Experiments

I've taught introduction to business for 12 years now. However, it seems like every semester is at least somewhat different. This semester, I experimented in two ways:

  1. Incorporated a bit of public sphere pedagogy (though the stories shared by Thia Wolf on the podcast still have me realizing I've only just scratched the surface)
  2. Tested more often and lowered the stakes on exams (inspired in part by James Lang‘s book, Small Teaching)

Public Sphere Pedagogy

This semester, I decided to take inspiration from Shark Tank and have business professionals come in as judges for the student's business plan presentations. The judge's role was to indicate how much confidence they would have in investing in the various business ideas that were shared.

Inviting people who haven't yet established relationships with the students was a very important part of the process. It seemed to cause the students to take their presentations more seriously than they might otherwise have… What the guests said carried more weight, since there was no way that having already known them would have impacted their perceptions of this final part of the course.

I can't recommend highly enough, incorporating some type of public sphere pedagogy into your course design. Doug McKee recently shared about the success of his poster sessions event for his applied econometrics class at Cornel. If nothing else, as he shares, your students will probably have a bit more fun.

Thia was so right when she said:

When [students] go public with their work, they have to stand by it, and really remarkable things happen.” – Thia Wolf

Testing Frequency and Stakes

Previously, when I taught introduction to business, there have been three exams. In total, the exams were worth 45% of the students' grades. Doing poorly on any one exam could potentially bring a student's grade down in the class an entire letter grade.

This semester, I decided to increase the frequency of exams and also add the ability for students to drop their lowest exam grade. The nice part about this process is that our learning management system (Canvas) has a feature built in that meant that throughout the semester, students could see that their lowest exam score was being dropped and they were even able to enter in what-if scenarios for what the mathematical results would be, if they attained certain scores on upcoming exams.

I added an exam in a format I've started calling the “not-so-final final exam.” Students are provided an overview of all the topics in the class, in the form of pencasts (video lectures with me drawing and them hearing my voice), quizzes, and assigned reading.

Those students who earned over 90% on the not-so-final final exam were allowed to skip taking the final exam and use that score as their final exam grade. As you might imagine, this was hugely motivational for some of the top students. 10% of the students were able to attain this grade and skip the final.

After the not-so-final final, students had three, regular exams, and one comprehensive final exam. When the judges for the business plan presentations were determining who the business(es) were that they were going to fictitiously invest in, I spoke to the students about their experiences with the revised exam format for this semester.

100% of the students indicated in our dialogue that they would prefer to take more exams, with the ability to have their lowest exam score graded. I was extremely pleased with this part of my semester's experiments and plan on incorporating this methodology in all future courses that involve exams.

2016 Fall Course Evaluations

Reading my course evaluations was quite edifying this semester. I received high scores on the questions that asked whether or not I explained the course requirements, was prepared to teach each class session, and that I used class time effectively.

I'm not going to go too much into particulars, but there was clearly a single student who was unhappy with the class and me as a professor. Whenever this happens, I work hard to remember that there were 29 others who had very positive things to report. Also, I attempt not to predict who it might have been who responded in that way. Nonetheless, I'm human, and sometimes I get discouraged, or I try to unravel the mystery of who it was…

I had someone recommend that I keep an encouragement folder with notes, emails, and letters from students to revisit, when I need a little boost. This time, it wasn't necessary for me to pull the encouragement folder out, but I mention it to you, in case you want to start depositing items like this into a folder, for the times when you'll be in need of affirmation.

It was nice to see that 100% of the students found that I was responsive to questions, was available for help outside of class, and that I graded assignments in a timely manner.

One of the evaluation questions that I typically skip to, when I first start reviewing them is the one regarding the difficulty of the course. As Betsy Barry shared on episode #089 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast:

It turns out that the harder your course is, the higher your evaluations will be…” – Betsy Barry

As I look at the students feedback about the difficulty of this course, I'm trying hard not to try to figure out who the two students might be who found the course somewhat easy. I was pleased that the majority of the students found it challenging, though.

I got to know the students who earned A grades fairly well in this class and all of them reported that it was difficult for them. I met with them often during the semester, as they worked to achieve good results on upcoming exams and assignments. Their hard work paid off… So, perhaps there were a couple of students who weren't aiming for an A, but thought that if they had put more effort in, they would have been able to “easily” achieve a higher grade.

Here I go, trying to figure out who responded in what way, when I'm not sure that's particularly helpful. Sigh. This is the quantitative feedback about the perceived difficulty level.

Edifying Feedback

As I finish this post, here are some comments I'll be saving in my encouragement file, for those times when I need to “get back up, again.”

How would you describe the effectiveness of the teaching activities for this particular course:

Holy cow, Dr. B could pack so much fun into such a short 50 minutes class. I learned so much about business, life and my faith through her expressive, personal, and hilarious personality. I loved every minute of this class, and as a non-major, graduating senior, I am beyond thankful that I took this class. I loved it.”

Every teaching activity inside and outside of class has really challenged me as a student and helped me learn in a way in which I never have before. My business professor, Dr. Stachowiak, is the best teacher I have ever had in my life, and I'm excited to take the skills I've learned in this course with me in life!”

This class changed my life. This was my first business class and yes it was a lot more work than my other classes, but I learned the most in this class. There are many things I can say that have helped me this semester. Outside of class she assigned us required reading and we had to take online quizzes for those chapters. A lot of work because it required you to read a few chapters then take a couple test all on the same time, but it forced me to read and be prepared for upcoming class. So the knowledge that I read, her teaching and discussions in class added to the knowledge I already knew. It was so helpful throughout the semester. I never felt like I was drowning with so much informations, she knew exactly what she as doing and how to prepare us for the best.”

Do you have any feedback and/or suggestions that might make this class more effective in the future?

I wish that every vanguard student could take this as a general education class. It is so helpful to know just some of the basics of business no matter where you end up in your career you will have a boss or be a boss and this gives you such a great taste of what business is all about. Dr. B is an incredible human and I am beyond thankful for the amount of time she took to know everyones name, speak into our individual gifts and abilities, and teach our class with care, concern and absolute joy that radiate from everything she does.”

Dr. Stachowiak has an amazing personality and made going to class enjoyable. Her teaching was very effective the way it is.”

Negative Feedback

As I indicated earlier, there was clearly one student who was unhappy with the course, in general, and with me, as the professor. I received some negative, qualitative feedback, along with the positive comments.

She should right down the notes instead of posting them online and expect us to know it all and what it means.”

NEED TO TAKE NOTES IN CLASS NOT ONLINE AND LEARN THEM ON YOUR OWN!”

I usually like to take any negative feedback that's been provided and think through some action steps I could perform to make the learning experience better for future students. However, in this case, it was difficult to know what this student meant by ‘notes,' since I don't really have ‘notes,' per se, that I post online, or provide in class.

The best I can take away from these comments is that perhaps this student felt a disconnect between what was happening in the classroom and what was done online (this class is in a blended format). I am constantly working to have communication channels that connect our in-class experiences with the online ones. That is likely something that I'll never feel like I have 100% right, but I'll never stop trying.

Also, I'm reminded of how Stephen Brookfield has shared how difficult it can be to teach. While this set of evaluations leave me feeling like we had a successful Fall of 2016, I never want to have even one person feel like they weren't provided with the help that they needed.

And so, we keep on working to facilitate learning more effectively for our students… And try to keep a sense of humor.